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Friday, September 14, 2012

Protests For Independence, Against America (Link Round-Up 9/14/12)

Separately, Bach says “unlicensed file sharing could consume the equivalent of up to four times the annual combined electricity consumption of all UK households”, while the 33 percent temporary reduction in web traffic seen by Sweden after it introduced anti-piracy laws in 2010 was equivalent to the electricity usage of 2,030 UK households.

Bach also calculates current YouTube energy consumption is around 0.1 percent of 2010 global electricity levels, rising to one percent by 2013.

Spain's economic crisis, which has left one out of four people unemployed, has sharpened Catalonia's demand for fiscal independence from Spain, as well as political autonomy.

Last month Catalonia demanded a bailout from Madrid of 5bn euros
Catalonia, which is Spain's wealthiest region and represents a fifth of the Spanish economy, wants to be able to raise its own taxes and spend them.

Last month, Catalonia demanded a bailout from Madrid of 5bn euros (£4bn), on the basis that it believes the central government owes the region that much in overpaid taxes.

The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

When the video started circulating, Nader Bakkar, the spokesman for the Egyptian Salafist Noor party, which holds about 25% of the seats in parliament, called on people to go to the embassy. He also called on non-Islamist soccer hooligans, known as Ultras, to join the protest.

On Monday, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Mohamed al Zawahiri, tweeted that people should go to the embassy and "defend the prophet," Trager said.

Zawahiri justified al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks in an interview with Al Jazeera last month.

Anti-Japanese protests have erupted in several Chinese cities in recent weeks. On Aug. 27 a man ripped the Japanese flag from a car carrying the Japanese ambassador while it was stopped behind two vehicles in Beijing. While the rallies have remained small and closely monitored by police, there is a history of such demonstrations turning violent, as when hundreds of rioters threw rocks and smashed windows at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing in 2005. On Friday Japan repeated a warning to its citizens in China to pay attention to their personal safety, and listed six cases of Japanese being harassed or assaulted because of their nationality, including one person who had noodles dumped on them.

Unlike Chinese disputes with some of its Southeast Asian neighbors over South China Sea claims, the Diaoyu conflict carries the added weight of Imperial Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of China. The Diaoyu Islands fell under Japanese control after the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, when Japan took over Taiwan and its surrounding islands. After World War II the U.S. administered the Diaoyu, returning them to Japanese administration in the 1970s. China argues the islands have long been recognized as its territory. Japan says the Diaoyu were no man’s land before 1895 and should be considered part of Okinawa. As with most disputes over islands in the western Pacific, the potential for undersea oil and gas reserves raises the stakes for all claimants. While the U.S. says it doesn’t take a position on the island’s sovereignty, it says that as they are administered by Japan they fall under the U.S.-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty, meaning the U.S. could be obligated to aid Japan in the event of an attack on them.